Nathan (1:51)

And what year was that?

Ben Kieran (1:52)

That was 20, late 2017, early 2018.

Nathan (1:56)

What's the archetype there? Were you like the engineering lead and he was the industry guy or what was the relationship?

Ben Kieran (2:01)

No, so Dave definitely the engineering guy or sorry, the industry guy. And both of us are engineers, but not software engineers. So he's an electrical engineer by background. I'm a nuclear engineer by background. He spent years and years and years, a couple decades in community association management, partnered with a couple folks who had built SaaS applications in this space before and kind of wrote the initial code. I came in and grew the team, grew the strategy in the industry. So kind of a couple of technical, non technical partners, I guess you could call us, Ben.

Nathan (2:33)

You have to connect these dots. How does a nuclear engineer end up running a HOA software company?

Ben Kieran (2:39)

It's a great question. I guess there's. There's no. I don't think there is any normal path to running an HOA software company because no one goes to school to. To kind of work in community association management or HOA management as it is. But my path, I was. I went to the United States Naval Academy for my undergrad education and ended up as a nuclear engineer and a submarine officer in the Navy. So spent time traveling all over the world having big adventures, kind of doing that. That was really important to me, to serve our country and to do something like that and also to have a big adventure. Kind of in my 20s, which I am glad and grateful to have done. But I always had kind of an entrepreneurial itch and knew I wanted to build something and loved technology, loved to tinker. I like to build little projects and do different things. And what I saw as an opportunity, not hoa. I didn't know anything about the HOA market, but these kind of not sexy vertical software markets that were sneaky big, either had a payments component or a financial services component or had a big ecosystem around it. Started looking at things in pest control and otherwise, and just through kind of networking and talking to people working in these industries, someone actually introduced Dave Sawyer, who was working, of all things, on an HOA management software platform for his HOA management company to me and said, you guys should get together. You're talking about all the same things. I don't know what this HOA market is, but let's get after it.

Nathan (4:08)

Interesting, interesting. This makes tons of sense. Okay, so he was in the industry running a management company, had so much pain, he started building his own code, got connected with you. You guys hit the ground running really hard in 2018. Let's. I want to fill in the story between 2018 and 2025, but I also don't want to lose the audience if they're going, what the heck is an hoa?

Ben Kieran (4:26)

Maybe a millennial.

Nathan (4:27)

They're going, I've never lived in a neighborhood before. Tell us what you sell here while I'm on your website.

Ben Kieran (4:31)

What's the problem? So we call the industry Community Association Management because it's more than just HOAs. But what the heck is an HOA. An HOA is a homeowner association. Even if you haven't lived in one. You've probably heard of a homeowner association or HOA or some kind of meme about it. It's, you know, these are typically neighborhoods or communities that have some sort of common area property. Think clubhouses, amenities, golf courses, restaurants, pickleball courts, just nice landscaped grass, anything like that. But it also encompasses condominium buildings. So if you live, you buy a condo, there is a shared common piece of real estate. That's the elevator, the lobby, the roof, the things like that. And there's a structure, a little, kind of almost like a little city that has a little constitution that are the covenants that kind of manage how you have to live in those communities. You can not do certain things like not paint your house pink, which preserves property values, but you also get benefits like the use of these amenities and common area assets. So there's a whole industry, specialty property management, that really focuses on serving just these community associations, serving owned real estate instead of things like multifamily rental. And those are our customers, those professional community association management companies.

Nathan (5:49)

Interesting. And how many customers are paying for the platform today?

Ben Kieran (5:52)

Right around 500 professional community association management companies that has within it 50,000 communities and over 6 million homes.

Nathan (6:03)

Interesting, interesting. You just sort of broke it down and sorry, sorry, 50, sorry, 500 logos, 550k communities and then 5 million homes.

Ben Kieran (6:13)

6 million homes.

Nathan (6:14)

6 million homes. Really? Okay, so where are you selling into? Are you bottoms up selling to one homeowner? Then you spread or you're top down.

Ben Kieran (6:20)

Selling absolutely top down. And we even started kind of far upmarket large management companies. And we've gone kind of further and further, kind of across that segment as we go. So our first customers had, you know, 50,000 plus doors or homes that they would manage at a time. But we sell to the community association management company, those folks, we become the general ledger system of record for them and for all the communities that they manage, as well as the system of work for all the work that gets done within that community, Coordinating with vendors, collecting dues, paying invoices, reporting, as well as the system of engagement for them to provide a technology kind of front door for all of the homeowners and residents in the communities that they manage.

Nathan (7:02)

Most smart software founders upsell against utility metric. Usually it's maybe number of seats. In your case, you could upsell. I'm curious what you upsell against number of homes, number of communities, number of pickleball courts. That are moving around. What's the thing you upsell against?

Ben Kieran (7:13)

Yeah, kind of the ultimate North Star metric is number of doors. I mean we care a lot about the number of primary users. Early on we thought about that a lot. The number of professionals working in Vantica every day as community association managers. But ultimately that North Star metric is the number of doors that are engaging with their communities through Vantica as the front door.

Nathan (7:33)

Okay, and that would be your 6 million homes.

Ben Kieran (7:34)

That's right.

Nathan (7:36)

Interesting. Industry standards in the space are like between 50 cents and $1.50 a door. Are you sort of in that range?

Ben Kieran (7:41)

Yeah, I think that's like, that's ballpark. The right, the right range to think about for SaaS. Obviously this can really change depending on are you managing single family low amenity hoas in Lincoln, Nebraska where there are, it's very light what your HOA does for you as a homeowner or are you in South Florida with a highly amenitized condo building where you've got valets and on site staff and restaurants and you know, other amenities. Obviously those, those dynamics change kind of sector by sector in the dynamics of the management company as well as the range of products that you consume. Are you using other financial services products like payments? We now have agentic AI kind of throughout the platform. That's really changed how our customers engage with us. But that's kind of the right banner way to think about the metrics.

Nathan (8:26)

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, @founderpath.com if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up@founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com I'm reading your body language and listening very carefully to how you're structuring your sentences and words. And what it's telling me is I think you're potentially beating $1.50 a door because you're doing some really creative things and adding value in other ways. Is my read right there.

Ben Kieran (9:06)

Yeah, I think that's, that's generally right. And again you're talking about, you know, price per month per door. You know, we have we have some of our products that are priced like that and others that are more consumption based and things like that.

Nathan (9:18)

Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Can we dig a bit deeper here on other business models? You already talked earlier, like, why just do SaaS if you're already ingrained and a guy from the space like Dave knows the space well and you guys build this great code. Why not do payments, why not do loans to community centers? Why not do whatever? How are you thinking about sort of what spaces to go into now that you have a beachhead? A mousetraps already in these 500 community manager relationships?

Ben Kieran (9:43)

Yeah, it's a great question. And so to be clear, we started with just a SaaS solution. We started with that beachhead that was the pure kind of single product for multiple years. Over time it's really expanded everything from payments, we have a payments platform and a payments product that is used across our customer base. That's both inbound payments from homeowners to their HOAs as well as outbound from HOAs to vendors. We provide a number of different treasury services for community association banks to connect them to the deposits that they are linked to through those associations, which is significant. It's a place where a lot of relatively low cost deposits are kind of aggregated by community association banks as well as other products around the vendor management ecosystem that are folks doing work in these HOAs, whether that's landscapers or electricians or insurance companies, et cetera. So we've over time really stretched into a lot of the different kinds of components of this ecosystem. But to your point, the beachhead and the first and most important vital product for us has and will always be that SaaS product that is the general ledger system of record.

Nathan (10:50)

Okay. And that still today makes it more than call it 60% of your total annual revenue.

Ben Kieran (10:54)

Yeah, that's fair.

Nathan (10:55)

Interesting. Okay, on the payments product, is that just a nice value add you do for free or do you sort of take a traditional 2 to 3% take rate on GMV going through the platform?

Ben Kieran (11:03)

No, it's less than that. I mean, it's certainly less than 2 to 3%. But we also, I'd say it's a value add for our customers, but it's also a way for them to strip out a lot of the friction between them and their customers. So if you think about living in an hoa, like do you mail a check to your clubhouse every month, do you drop it off or can you set recurring payments? Something like that? That sounds so simple. But that's what we're walking into often in the way these HOA management companies have to manage things like their payments processes. So we're stripping out a lot of the friction as much as we can.

Nathan (11:40)

Interesting, interesting business model. Interesting use case. Very specific niche which we love. Tell me more about the private equity store. Again, you get going in 2018. You guys scale 2019. When did you bootstrap up to like when did you raise your first external capital?

Ben Kieran (11:53)

Yeah, so we didn't raise any real external capital until 2022. So it was the summer of 2022, which was great. I mean that kind of run. And really 2018 we had had a couple of paying customers late. 2017 is where kind of we got this first, folks. 2018, first year in market. So we had had about five years of survival under our belt in terms of bootstrapping the business along and growth was really good. It wasn't. This has never been a highly capital intensive business, but we saw an opportunity in 2022 that we really had gone from just capital efficient to capital constrained and knew we wanted to invest more in product, knew we wanted to invest more in engineering and really take a big swing at this industry. And so we partnered with JMI Equity in a minority investment in 2022, which was great. They've been fantastic partners to us. We've grown the business more than 10x since then. So that's been a great kind of growth story since 2022.

Nathan (12:54)

And then based off homes or revenue?

Ben Kieran (12:57)

Revenue and home's not far off either, but certainly revenue. And then this past year in terms of funding, we did a minority recap, brought in another minority investor in Cove Hill, Cove Hill Partners. That was fantastic. We closed that investment and announced it this fall, which again has just further added fuel to the fire for us and allows us to keep taking a bit big swing at this industry.

Nathan (13:26)

Let me try and unpack a little bit of that in case someone else is listening in there. Your version of 2018 thinking, man, maybe in three or four years I want to go this sort of minority route. 2018, 2017, you had a couple customers. Are you comfortable sharing sort of first year where you two are working? The other 2018, what was total revenue that year?

Ben Kieran (13:40)

Yeah, I mean very little. Think 2018 in the low hundred thousands of revenue.

Nathan (13:46)

Okay. And then do you remember the year you passed your first million?

Ben Kieran (13:49)

It would have been the following year.

Nathan (13:52)

Okay, that's pretty good growth.

Ben Kieran (13:53)

It happened relatively quickly. And I think you're giving us or me a little too much credit that we had this plan to bootstrap it along and then do a minority round, we didn't. Neither Dave nor myself are in kind of the VC or PE kind of world from our background. So we didn't know what we didn't know. We just knew that we saw an industry, we saw a problem solving. We knew this could be a really big opportunity. We knew if we just continued to do the work, we would be able to find these opportunities as they presented themselves. And so we really didn't have that perfect plan to do that. It ended up being the right thing to do. But we just continued to try to reinvest everything that the business could give us back into the business and go find our potential for growth and go find more customers. We were lucky enough to develop a really outstanding reputation very quickly in the industry because we won some large, influential and very successful customers who were able to post extremely great results on their side by using our software. And we were able to continue to kind of reinvest in the business that way.

Nathan (14:58)

That's obviously a great story. Were most of those earlier customers the reason you could close those enterprise accounts early on was because Dave came from the industry, so he had connections there. Or was it you cold calling, knocking on doors, hustling?

Ben Kieran (15:09)

I'd say it's all of those things. You know, it's not just one thing. I think we did have some really good connections in the industry, but that certainly wasn't it. We were quickly selling to strangers. But what we were able to do is really show the results of our early customers. Even Dave's management company, who is experiencing tremendous growth by utilizing a much newer and best in class technology platform and really do kind of show and tell with all of our customers, who really, all of our early customers were willing to be great advocates for us and open their kind of doors and show new prospective customers the success that they were having. And so our customer success is really what fueled us.

Nathan (15:50)

And then before we get into the external capital story, I want to give you guys like complete credit for what you bootstrapped to. Are you comfortable sharing what you bootstrapped to in terms of revenue before you took out external capital in 2022?

Ben Kieran (16:00)

Call it high single digit millions.

Nathan (16:02)

Okay, so between 5 and 10 million?

Ben Kieran (16:04)

Sure.

Nathan (16:05)

Okay, very cool. So at that point you said you knew you were capital constrained at that point, why did you know you could spend money on ads and you didn't have profits through that? Or you want to go buy a company? Like what made you guys look at each other one morning and go, man, we are capital constrained.

Ben Kieran (16:18)

Yeah, I don't think it was a single thing. What we found is that we were able to consistently, as we reinvest more in the business, continue to open up the constraints of our capacity. Things like onboarding and implementation, things like delivering on a product roadmap that would continue to open up new markets, things like just continuing to invest ahead of sales and marketing to open up capacity. We had really, really light sales and marketing investment for the first several years of the business. And so all of those things together, we just realized every additional dollar we were able to put in the business, you know, five or ten more dollars come out within a pretty short period of time. But it's just, what is that time delay and how much can we short circuit that time delay? And so all of those things together kind of had us look at each other and say, hey, this is the moment where we know this is working. We have the playbook now. We need to scale and it's worth investing ahead.

Nathan (17:10)

And then can we fast forward to today? And then I want to wrap up with your take on AI and product roadmap you guys have for next year. But if you were doing high single digit millions in 2022, let's do the worst case, 5 million. And you also said you 10x since then, that would put you at about 50 million this year. Am I in the right ballpark there?

Ben Kieran (17:28)

I won't give you an exact number, but you're not orders of magnitude off.

Nathan (17:32)

Okay, fair. I mean, I'm just using your. To be fair, I'm just using your numbers. You said 10x since 2022 and you said 2022 is high single digits. So. Okay, fair enough. So take me through the minority sort of negotiation there for somebody else listening, negotiating their own minority. I mean, what. Why did you guys do minority instead of majority? How did you decide on the amount of capital? Was it all primary capital or was some of it secondary? How'd you think about that?

Ben Kieran (17:53)

Yeah, great, great question. So it was a mix of primary and secondary capital. We had some folks we were solving for two things. Primarily we were solving for cash into business, right? So starting from that chunk and saying, okay, we know we want to capitalize the business, put some. What can we forecast over the next three or four years on kind of an aggressive front, which was still relatively capital efficient at the time. And then also we had a couple of folks who had been working in the business for several years at that point who really had the business had grown and exceeded their Expectations. We wanted to provide some liquidity to some, some early kind of members of the company, which we were able to do. And that was great. And so that's kind of how we thought about the mix in terms of why minority versus majority. It was clear to us that that was a checkpoint that would accelerate growth. I don't know if we perfectly saw over the next three or four years, 10x over that period of time, but we saw that as a possibility. We saw a minimum of five plus X. So why would we want to sell. Sell more of the business at the time than we had to? And so that's been great. And really we approached this most recent investment similarly. We want to capitalize the business first, provide some liquidity to some earlier investors. We did a friends and family round right alongside jmi. Really small dollars, but truly friends and family returned some capital to them. Amazing. And then retain majority control and kind of the ownership of the business to go and to take a big swing at this point.

Nathan (19:20)

So is JMI and early families still on the cap table or that's why cobill came in, they took out JMI.

Ben Kieran (19:25)

And early JMI rolled is still on the cap table as is, as is most of the friends and family. We just provided some liquidity to those parties.

Nathan (19:34)

Very cool. All right, as we wrap up here, we got to talk about like AI briefly. Right. How are you think you're deep into, you see a lot of data, you're connected to a lot of doors. How are you thinking about like AI in your product roadmap on a go forward basis?

Ben Kieran (19:46)

Yeah, it's a great question. It's been the single biggest game changer for us certainly in the last two or three years. So we've been building internally with AI for several years and putting products in front of our customers as well. And then kind of the big bang moment for us was late 2024, we acquired a small kind of business, really almost acqui. Hired a couple of really talented partners out of Y Combinator, a company called HOAI that joined Vantica. We still operate that, that product as an independent product brand but within Vantica closed that kind of late 2024 and very quickly has become a really meaningful part of our business. Almost all of our new logos onboard both Vantica and Hway together. And what Hway is, is. Is really an agent that lives within the Vantica instance that relentlessly pursues all the tasks that humans would have otherwise used Vantica to do so. Executing customer billings, answering homeowner questions about bills, paying invoices creating reports, solving complex problems. It's quickly grown to touch really every bit of Vantica and every bit of the homeowner experience. We have an HVAI voice agent that replaces or supplements a call center for management companies to answer homeowner calls and solve billing questions and create follow ups all through kind of our customer base. So that's been really transformational in terms of how we engage with our customers.

Nathan (21:19)

Well, Dave, people want to. Want to. If people. Sorry, Ben, if people want to watch you and Dave execute this strategy over the next 12 months or so, where's the best place they can follow you guys online?

Ben Kieran (21:26)

Yeah, I mean, so that's a good question. Our marketing team would hate my answer. I'm not wildly active in. Neither is Dave, neither is Haoyu, the founder of Hway, who is now my partner. But Vantica is. So I would like. The Vanica website's good. We have multiple channels. There's a Vanica podcast, Guilty by Association to play on association manager. There's tons of good stuff out there, so I'd keep up with that. And certainly if you're within our industry, you'll see us on all those channels, guys.

Nathan (21:56)

Ben's partner Dave had an HOA management company in 2017. He said, I gotta fix all the inefficiencies. Let me build software. Ben said, let me join. In 2018, they hit the ground running, break about 300,000 bucks of revenue in 2018. Way more than double in 2019, up to about a million bucks of revenue. It caught 5 to 10 million of revenue in 2022. Totally bootstrapped. Before they go, let's pour fuel on this fire. And they did with a minority investment from JNI and Aqua Hire of a YC company in 2024. Now investing in growth. Call it north of 40. 50 million bucks of AR, somewhere in that range, right? But 500 community managers, 50,000 communities, million homes. Helping these communities run more efficiently with both software products, payment products, project management products, you name it. They're vertically integrated. Ben, thanks for taking us to the top.

Ben Kieran (22:41)

Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it.

Nathan (22:42)

You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode. Right now.